The Benefits of Reading Aloud (WSJ Book Club)

This week, the WSJ Book Club will be discussing the benefits and surprises that come with reading a book aloud. Especially when it’s a book as strange as James Thurber’s 1950 illustrated tale, “The 13 Clocks.”

Thurber’s book is our WSJ Book Club pick of the month, selected by Neil Gaiman, author of “American Gods,” “Coraline,” and “The Ocean at the End of the Lane.” We’ll be posting discussion questions each week on Facebook, Twitter, and Speakeasy. You can also pose your own questions and comments on the WSJ Book Club Facebook group, and follow the hashtag #WSJbookclub and reporter Anna Russell on Twitter for ongoing updates.

Mr. Gaiman first read “The 13 Clocks” when he was about 8 years old. Later, he read the book aloud to his little sister, and eventually his own children. In his introduction to the book, he describes reading the story aloud to a teary friend: “I picked up a copy of the The 13 Clocks and began to read it aloud. And soon enough my friend was laughing, baffled, and delighted, her problems forgotten. I had said the right thing.”

Beyond the book’s subject matter, the language itself is unique. Mr. Gaiman described the words as “potato chippish.” “They crunch in very satisfying ways in your mouth,” he said. Reading aloud can bring out features in a text that might otherwise have remained hidden.

“One thing you really only discover when you read this book aloud is the amount of weird and wonderful internal rhymes,” said Mr. Gaiman. “I highly recommend that if you have anybody that will sit still long enough, or possibly just a patient dog or a hamster, read this book aloud to them. If you read this book aloud, you will find things in it that you did not know were there. One of those things are poems. It’s stuff that’s kind of semi-hidden, because it isn’t laid out as poetry.”

Readers, what do you make of the practice of reading aloud? If you’ve tried reading “The 13 Clocks” aloud, what have you found?